Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Yale has organized a "boot camp" for graduate students writing their dissertations. This suggests to me a militarization of labor discipline, speed-up in which surveillance is not only ever more integrated and obviously integrated, but constructed as desired, as useful. But the manner in which the event is framed - granting to those poor abject PhD's the amenities afforded to Yale undergrads living in the residential colleges, suggests the national project of infantilizing adult graduate employees, which is central to the post-Brown Decision project of rendering us primarily students, perpetual "trainees" - unless cast into the role of the post-Yeshiva (powerless) "managerial" professoriate. Graduate students suffer because they have been exiled from the uterine comfort of the dormitory. (Possibly because they have been illegally evicted from their graduate dorm, but let's not go there at the moment.) The graduate student as ADD-afflicted procrastinator who cannot complete work and therefore must be subjected to administrative speed-ups and streamlines seems a particular potent formation in the ideological topography of neoliberal academe, producing an ideal terrain for interventions such as this boot camp, however benignly intended, the 2-4 project in the Yale GSAS, and similar initiatives elsewhere, to be certain...
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I don't disagree with your characterization of Yale as attempting to render graduate students infantile and powerless -- that is, I think, a fairly transparent M.O.
ReplyDeleteBut I don't see this boot camp/writing retreat as an example of that, especially as regards surveillance and speed-ups. The YDN article may be missing some of the politics of this program (wouldn't be the first time), but it seems to me like just the kind of thing that _some_ people who care about their work would find useful. Others might not work well in that environment, or might not need that kind of concentrated time. But for the ones who do, this seems like an ideal sort of proactive approach to a focus problem that at least 40 people clearly believe exists.
I bring this up in the spirit of respectful disagreement because -- without speaking for anyone else -- I personally have felt rather alienated by the tendency of academic labor activists to stretch for accusation opportunities. I believe it weakens the overall argument regarding casualized labor, and buttresses the view of graduate student unionists as polemical, hyper-jargon-obsessed reactionaries. Personally, I don't hold that view, since in my experience graduate student unionists are people who have invested a great deal of time and energy in thinking about their role in education and the future of the Academy, and are committed to acting to make the Academy better. But when something like this "boot camp" comes along that, for everything I can see, _does_ in fact make things better for graduate students, tearing it apart on principle calls that committment into question. It makes people (including me, at times) wonder whether graduate student unionists are more committed to the ideology than to the change.
Anyway, I know this response may be way out of proportion to the scope of the observation you made, but if you have time to respond about either something you feel I've missed in the "boot camp" program or my overall reaction, I'd be interested.
I'm inclined to agree with Alek that this 'bootcamp' is more goofy than evil. Still, it does seem like an opening to discuss the factors (like low wages and subsequent mediocre housing; heavy teaching duties; inadequate support for people balancing school and family responsibilities) that make an intensive two-day retreat seem necessary.
ReplyDeleteMy problem is not with the bootcamp as such. I am nowehre near new haven and doon't have the best sense of what's going on there at the moment. I choose that example because it affords me a relative safety to avoid dealing with some fucked up stuff closer to home at the moment that doesn't necessarily belong on this blog. But even so, I'm more interested in the metaphor than anything else. If people feel like this helps them write, I've got too many incompletes to even think of saying that's a bad thing.
ReplyDeleteThe problem at least from the biomedical sciences is not that they treat us as students, it is the increasing amount of extra stuff we have to do in lab not to mention the ever increasing duties of our advisors (taking them away from their teaching/mentoring duties). Work that used to be done by employees. The main desire I hear from such grad students is a call to protect us from this encroaching extra duties. The call is also for better training, better mentorship, more resources and support so that we can focus on learning. In other words to be students and not employees. We want good teaching and in good teaching infantilizing should not be occuring. Students themselves have the right to organize and demand a constructive learning environment.
ReplyDeleteGot it. That seems sensible.
ReplyDeleteI certainly spit up when I got the invitation to it, if that helps the matter at all.
ReplyDeleteOne of the major prescriptions of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation's "Responsive Ph.D." was to expand the power of central graduate school administrations - very specifically, schools were encouraged to develop a graduate school identity, as a separate and spirited being discernable from the institution as a whole. I think it is a telling part of the longer-term vision for graduate schools to see them becoming more and more "schools" ie. later iterations of college, something one ought to pay for, something that does not lead to a specific career path (these institutions having zero committment to making the kinds of jobs such a career path would involve). To that extent, whatever ways a school can find to draw academics into greater confinement and operation within certain physical boundaries of the "school" (YGSAS scarves and tailgates at The Game, "boot camp," "the McDougal Center," "the FEAST Program," the latter of which was cited by the WWF as an example of leading innovation in graduate education - christ, it's meal tickets so you can eat in the cafeteria with your advisor, effing brilliant!) are all examples of an attempt to reinforce the idea of a graduate school as the locus of your intellectual work, as opposed to your department or, heaven forbid, the Doktorvater/Doktormutter model of mentorship that universites still rely on when attempt to crush organizing - curiously a model that itself is going the way of the dinosaurs as faculty find themselves incapable of intervening on behalf of their students for registration or any other needs.
programs like that piss me off for a slightly different reason: they presume I have two full days in a row on two consecutive weekends to work on my dissertation. all I can say is....that would be nice.
ReplyDeleteI guess that speaks to the infantalizing point. I'm not an ADD afflicted procrastinator, as they seem to assume, and I just don't have the time to head off to a retreat. In real life, I'm a grown up with a young child to care for and a variety of other responsibilities that require my attention.
Did you know this post was linked to by Insidehighered?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.insidehighered.com/around_the_web
Yes, possibly the most site traffic ever. Kind of embarrasing given how Alek tears me a new one and a little disconcerting given off the cuff remarks above about sensitive controversies, but also sort of awesome. Thank gd I'm newly pseudo-anonymous. Or at least pseduonymous.
ReplyDeletestick to your guns.
ReplyDelete